the pregame show.

It just didn’t seem right to subject myself to an austerity diet in advance of our New Haven pizza extravaganza, so on Saturday I just gave in to my apparently inescapable need for smothered eggs with biscuits and gravy at Great Jones Cafe; crema-filled bomboloni, cappucino, and vino at Maialino for dessert (are you supposed to have dessert at brunch?); happy hour at Ten Degrees in the East Village; and glorious seafood and tonkatsu curry plates at Curry-Ya for dinner.   The only sour note was the Phillies’ loss to the Giants in the National League Championship Series opener, though the raucous crowds at Pacific Standard (mostly SF Giants fans, but what can you do?) were pretty hilarious.

No Saturday brunch would be complete without a lot of city-wandering, and somehow we managed to do a nearly complete loop from near the Bowery up to Bloomingdales (long story) and back down to the East Village again, with a nice stroll around Gramercy Park and a much more claustrophobic one in Eataly.  Sweet Jesus, that place is a shitshow.  I’m all for a market where I can buy hard-to-find Italian food products, but once you attach Mario Batali’s name to it, the whole thing becomes a Thing To Experience, and no longer about the food itself.  There’s no way you’re gonna convince me that eating in the various in-house (in-market?) restaurants is going to be much better than a high-end Vegas food court.   Especially when you’re forced to stand at a high table, nibbling on your soppressata and robiola, convincing yourself that This Is Awesome, while random shoppers absent-mindedly bump into you as they saunter past. 

Then again, you’re also talking to someone who spent the following day in an entirely different city, just to eat pizza, so it’s not like I’m suggesting anything approximating a moral or gastronomic highground here.  I guess I just have a thing against incredibly noisy food halls owned by orange-beclogged celebrity chefs whose actual restaurants are overrated at best, and possibly just plain mediocre. 

Wow.  This was not the post I had meant to write.  Ah well.